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User blog:Abc8920/Chapter 16 snippet - Scientists
Tick, tack. Tick, tack. The sound of the evil hands of a mechanical clock marked the sluggish flow of time, hammering Lepak’s brain as it ticked on and on. The poor Matoran was on the brink of insanity, an insomniac in an asphyxiating Southern Continent night. “I have to find a rational solution out of this” muttered the Ko-Matoran to himself like a mantra. “I’m a scientist, after all.” So that was what he did. Jumping out of the bed in a spastic movement, he clutched the malevolent device and threw it out of his window, feeling great pleasure upon hearing a loud crashing sound on the jungle floor. But the Ko-Matoran was now too awake to go back to the sweat-soaked bed. It would be worthless. Sleeping in tropical heat was rocket science to him. He sat down in his chair, trying to figure out the reason he was in this god-forsaken place at all. Then he remembered – a scientific expedition organized by the Matoran High Council of Metru Nui, to learn more about the nature of protodermis. The practical application – medicine. The Metru Nui military knew that medicines could be just as useful as weapons on a battlefield. Still, that didn’t answer his original question. The pay was derisory. Back in the good old days, the pay he received now monthly would have barely been enough to get fixed in Le-Metru. No, there was a deeper reason that had pushed him to his current situation. He had had to run from the rotting carcass of Metru Nui. Most historians would say that Metru Nui had won the war. They obviously knew nothing of war, or its consequences. The strict wartime laws weren’t abolished when combat ended. The economy, crippled by the war effort, failed to progress, instead cycling between alternating periods of anemic growth and recession. There was also the tension caused by the mass immigration. It was the Matoran High Council’s favorite smokescreen. They always blamed insecurity on badly integrated newcomers. And while they weren’t completely wrong, it was a lie that immigrants weren’t integrated – the lingua franca spoken these days in Metru Nui were widgets, and every single citizen was a fluent speaker. Some said that the Tuyet dam was the biggest in Metru Nui, but in reality the biggest dam was the Coliseum, were the river of money stalled for the rulers to feed off. The once noble ruling class had been taken over by the politics of with-me-or-against-me, of corruption, of smoke grenades and zero relativism. Only Turaga Matoro remained with his hands clean. But Lepak didn’t care about that. He had run away due to the lack of opportunities. Scientists weren’t valued as they once were. During the six previous months before the expedition, he had sent a couple hundred CV’s, never getting any response. For many years he had had to get by doing underqualified jobs at minimum wage. So when he saw the opportunity, even if it meant living in the Southern Continent, he hadn’t had a single doubt. Lepak decided he had to relax. All that remembering was starting to stress him out again. He got up from his chair and shuffled around the room, looking for a certain piece of equipment. On the way, he observed that the moisture indicators indicated a figure way too close to 100% humidity. He finally found it, a black metal case with a fragile sing stamped in the side. He opened it and took a telescope out. It was ironic that for an expedition with the role of studying at molecular and atomic level, they had been issued a telescope and a spectrometer instead of the two spectrometers that he and the other member of the expedition, Ryla, needed. Good riddance that the Ga-Matoran had decided that helping out the local “fixed” Matoran was more important than carrying out their task, since that meant that the only spectrometer was Lepak’s to use. The Ko-Matoran put the telescope next to the window. Doing this remembered him of his home, Ko-Metru, and relaxed him. Also, it had been prognosticated that that night there would be shooting stars, so it added a plus of interest to the activity. He looked at a red card next to the telescope, lying on the floor, and cursed. It was the digital card where his digital money was uploaded every month. When that happened, he had to engage in a two day trip to a half-ruined town far away, where the only Matoran who changed digital cash for widgets in the whole continent lived. That Matoran had some connections with the Brotherhood, and charged a percentage for the operation, but they had no choice. Lepak wondered for a moment about Ryla. He hadn’t seen her in a long while. After both parted ways, they only met once in a month to exchange their cash for widgets. But this month Lepak hadn’t seen her. Thinking it through, he just shrugged, thinking it didn’t matter. After all, money was almost useless. Most of the Matoran villages around didn’t use widgets and instead just bartered. There was only one Matoran he knew that accepted widgets – a phoenician Ko-Matoran called Kyros – and his prices were extremely expensive. Again, Lepak had no other choice. The Ko-Matoran went back to his chair, looking at the digital clock hanging on the wall. This one he wouldn’t throw out of the window. There were still a few long hours before the shooting starts started appearing in the night sky, so he decided to just sit there and try to get some rest. Category:Blog posts